November 4, 2003

Fear of Thinking

Scotland's Sunday Herald carries a piece that discusses four men on the Jersey side of the Hudson River on September 11, 2001, who filmed the Trade Center atrocity and danced. The men were Israelis and two of them were agents of the Israeli spy agency Mossad. Author Neil Mackay writes, "Their discovery and arrest that morning is a matter of indisputable fact. To those who have investigated just what the Israelis were up to that day, the case raises one dreadful possibility: that Israeli intelligence had been shadowing the al-Qaeda hijackers as they moved from the Middle East through Europe and into America where they trained as pilots and prepared to suicide-bomb the symbolic heart of the United States. And the motive? To bind America in blood and mutual suffering to the Israeli cause."

It actually raises more than one possibility. As brave as this piece is in going against the prevailing conventional beliefs about 911, it clings to an article of faith that has never been established beyond conjecture: that al Qaeda was the perpetrator of the crimes that day. More and more people are finding the presence of mind to break from the "with-us-or-against-us" mold and realize that those who aren't flag-waving 100% supporters of every lunatic policy of the Bush cabal are not necessarily subversives who should be summarily executed. But the "al Qaeda did it" axiom still holds the power of religious axiom with the vast majority, even though there has never been a case advanced to support the conclusion. It's been presented and accepted as an article of faith. Refusing to believe is an act of heresy, of defiance of the rulers who define the reality the rest of us are supposed to subscribe to devoutly and without question.

It's still an open question who destroyed the World Trade Center, how and why. Someone somewhere surely knows the answer of what happened that day and who was behind it, but the answer has never been established in the public forum. In fact, it seems as if the men of the administration have pointedly refrained from produce any convincing evidence for why they concluded immediately that the perpetrator was al Qaeda, in order to train people to accept their pronouncements without question.

The maintenance of power and control of this absurd regime depends on mindless conformity of the majority. As long as most people do not have the intellectual courage to think outside of the boundaries the masters have drawn for us, their mastery remains unthreatened.

Of course even if one accepts the dictum that it was al Qaeda who attacked the towers, there is still plenty of room to argue against the hideous policies of the regime. So people like Chomsky, or David Corn, who refuse to entertain the notion that the attack may have been an inside job, can start building their cases based on what the administration has done after the fact, how it has manipulated that incident to further an agenda that has no relationship to what happened that day. And they are certainly right about that.

It may be more effective to start from that point and not get hung up in debating mysteries that may never be solved. But even if one disregards who perpetrated the atrocity, it seems to me a matter of principle that one does not accept explanations that have no support. Especially when they are given by people who are proven to be untrustworthy. In this case by people who rarely tell the truth.